Two men have been arrested for uploading an copy of Expendables 3 to the Internet weeks before it was released. Rather than the usual civil suit and monetary penalties, London detectives in the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit arrested the men suspected of illegally getting the film from a cloud-based storage… »11/26/14 4:30am 11/26/14 4:30am

Using a pulsed laser beam from aboard its recently launched Lunar and Atmospheric Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), NASA has transmitted data over the 239,000 miles between the Moon and Earth at a record-breaking download rate of 622 megabits per second. Say goodbye to the glacial transmission speeds of RF… »10/24/13 9:30am 10/24/13 9:30am

Question: would you sign up for a one-way trip to Mars? Followup question for those who answered "No": what if you had an internet connection? Obviously, a lifetime on Mars would be a lot more enjoyable with a steady diet of cat videos. But would it be possible? »6/06/13 11:36am 6/06/13 11:36am

Recently, two seemingly contradictory pieces of copyright law have popped up in the news. One is the case of Jonathan Coulton, whose arrangement of Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" was lifted by the producers of Glee. Another is the recent case of a car customizer who was barred from making Batmobiles by a District… »2/27/13 12:00pm 2/27/13 12:00pm

Fan fiction and fan art are both enormous components of our popular culture, a way we retell our favorite stories just as humans have always retold myths and legends. But sometimes creators, publishers, and studios claim that works of fan art and fan fiction violate their copyright. So is that Supernatural fanfic… »8/12/12 9:00am 8/12/12 9:00am

If you're making a flicking gesture with a pen near your computer, watch out. Microsoft may own the rights to the gesture you're making. And if you like to draw letters of the alphabet using one penstroke per letter, you may one day find yourself paying a licensing fee to Xerox. »6/06/11 10:00am 6/06/11 10:00am